A part of my Italian-Australian life in two photos… the first one – Nanna Francesca (centre) taking her visiting cousins from Sydney to Qld’s Big Pineapple. To me, there’s something about seeing these three Italian migrant women standing in front of something so Australian, knowing how my nonna loved going there and knowing how it was a world away from their stone villages in Italy. Nanna Francesca brought me back an enormous Big Pineapple pencil with a pineapple on the end of it. I was about five (and still have it!) She also bought herself a Big Pineapple tea-towel and salt and pepper shakers.
These shakers – in the second photo – sat, never used, behind glass in her ‘good’ cabinet, for decades. Then, after my grandparents had both died and the family was packing up their house of more than fifty years, I found myself standing in front of this cabinet looking at those two pineapples. Yes, they were kitschy but I couldn’t let them end up lost, so now they sit on a bookshelf in my kitchen, a little reminder of Nanna Francesca that makes me smile.
Part of her heart was in Calabria, her birthplace, with her family still there. The other part, in Queensland, where she lived out her life, with her family there. Her love of two places, remembering the former, embracing the latter, a factor of migrant life that makes it richer yet a little heart-breaking too, and I’m so grateful (in all my ‘mezza Italiana’ tussles) that she showed me how she combined the two.
Zoë Boccabella 